My Gifts

As I mentioned I would do in my previous post, here are some of the things we got (mostly I got or have since comandeered due to lack of interest from the giftee...). Some are really liked by the giftee and I just had to show them here. :) I admit that I didn't take any of the pictures as they are all easy to find online and in much better quality than I could ever create - I'm a horrible photographer.

My Roomba 560

ScumBuster

Sennheiser RS 140 Wireless Balanced Headphones

Red Vines

Microcontroller Experimentation Kit

Jordan's "Precious"

Halo 3 Laser Pursuit Plasma Weapons

This is long because I've been slacking... sorry

I got involved in the holiday season and didn't update my blog at all. Here's what's been going on with us:

Jordan finished his first quarter in 6th grade. He made the honor roll with a 4.0 GPA. Good going, J!

Jeff and Jordan both had roughly two weeks off from work and school. It was a nice break for all of us. We watched a lot of movies, played games, and visited with extended family.

For Christmas I got some great gifts. I got a new Roomba from Jeff. Jordan got me a ScumBuster. I know that most women don't enjoy getting cleaning supplies for holiday gifts (the implication isn't very nice) but I requested the ScumBuster on my wish list. I had been eyeing the new Roomba for a few months but since I still have my old one (I can't find the charger for it), I opted to not ask for a new one. I was content with just buying a charger after the holidays were over. Now I have two and I can have one on the ground floor and one upstairs. The basement is so small and unused that there's no need for another vacuum down there.

Anyone who knows me knows that I hate to clean. I like things to be clean, and I like it done my way, but I hate doing it. Jeff always tells me that if I hate cleaning so much, I should just hire a cleaning company. But I'm embarassed by my messes and would end up cleaning for the cleaning crew. Plus, I like my cleaning supplies - the chemicals, the tools, etc. When I clean, I know I do a good job. When I use my own dirty bathroom, I know that the filth is my own. Letting strangers come into my house only leads to uncertainty of whether they actually cleaned what I wanted them to and whether they availed themselves of my facilities. I don't care to imagine that someone else used my toilet without my permission. So, with such uncertainty, my house remains dirty until I get around to cleaning it myself.

My new Roomba is so wonderful. It has a scheduler on it so I can set it to clean daily and not have to worry. I haven't used the scheduler yet, but I've had a great deal of fun running Roomba almost daily. I would much rather take the vacuum apart than actually use it for its intended purpose, so Roomba and I get along. I love to do the maintenance on him (Roomba is always a male to me). The maintenance involves emptying the collection bin/filter and cleaning the brushes. iRobot has made this Roomba so easy to maintain that it is a pure joy. I haven't had to use a screwdriver yet, which I am used to doing. The new cleaning tool for the brushes is so easy to use that I don't have to spend over an hour trying to get my stubborn hair off the brushes. I love it.

My ScumBuster is great, too. I had researched it quite a bit to make sure it did what I want. My bathtub has a permanent grip built into the bottom (basically a raised criss-cross pattern in the fiberglass) and dirt gets stuck down in there and is very tough to get out. The bottom of the tub is always much darker than the sides. I've tried all sorts of chemicals and tools to clean it out, but to no avail. I thought that Comet, being so abrasive and strong, would do something, but it didn't. Scrubbing with all my might never worked. So, I thought this device would, since it has bristles and is powered (very strong spinning motion). So far I have been pleased with the results. The tub isn't perfect yet (I ran out of battery after about 45 minutes), but the spots I focused on are nice and clean. I will have to clean it over several sessions to get it where I want it. The ScumBuster did a marvelous job on our bathroom counter & the sinks. Grime that I thought was permanent damage to the sinks came out. Nice!

I also got some great headphones from Jeff (he got himself a pair, too!). They are wireless and the transmitter plugs into the television. Now I can watch TV or movies (or listen to music on the network) and not annoy others. It's great for when Jeff and I want to watch something and Jordan is in his room and doesn't need to hear it. We have a great TV, but there are two odd things about it. 1) Some strange connection thing causes the TV (and TiVo) and console games to be nice and loud, but any DVDs or BluRays played on the same consoles to be really quiet. So, for watching TV or playing games, we have the volume turned up to 25 or 30 (out of 60). For watching movies, we have to turn the volume up to 60. Also, the shape of our living room is such that the sound goes up into the loft (toward the office and Jordan's room) more than it goes to the couch. So, from the upstairs, the movie is absolutely deafening. From the living room, it is comfortably pleasant. So, these headphones are working wonders to direct the sound at the intended recipient. :)

Another good thing about the headphones is that I can now watch shows that don't have captions. With my hearing loss, it's tough to understand what is said. I need to read it to get the full meaning. And that's the other strange thing about our TV. DVDs that come with subtitles work great. The subtitles are built into the DVD and don't require the TV to do anything special. Captions, on the other hand, use the TV to display them. Our TV doesn't allow captions from DVDs or BluRays to be shown. Subtitles work great but captions don't. We've researched this and found that the TV simply lacks the ability. :(  TV shows work fine with captions, but our movies don't. So, for movies that we have that don't have subtitles (or poorly captioned TV shows), we've been avoiding. This is sad, as I like all our movies (well, most) and I want to watch them. It's just a pointless activity for me to sit down to watch a movie and not understand the dialogue. This means that most of the plot is lost on me, as well as various relationships between the characters. I'd rather clean the house than attempt to watch a show that I can't follow.

So, with the headphones, I can watch our subtitle-less movies. We can also stream movies from Netflix (free with our current account) and not worry that they have no subtitles. It's wonderful! I watched Heroes and had no problems, even with Mohinder's wonderful accent.

For a quick run-through of my other gifts, I got a tub of Red Vines from Jordan, some gift certificates from friends/family, some new books, my ever favorite package of crackers, and some other small things.

Technically I got Jeff & Jordan several "together" gifts - a microcontroller, some RFID gadgets, and Halo laser tag guns. However, the microcontroller has gone to Jeff and I (we had a blast programming it to do fun things), and Jeff loves the RFID stuff while Jordan is rather bored with it. I tried. The Halo guns will be fun, but we haven't really used them much yet.

As an early present, we gave Jordan a "Lord of the Rings" ring. Just before the holiday break we watched all three movies and he kept saying how much he wanted his own "precious" and so I got him one. It has the elven letters on it and he wears it everywhere he goes. I was surprised that he liked it as much as he did. He's never been one for jewelry, hats, watches, etc, so I was sort of expecting to inherit this ring (I made sure to get a size that fits both of us, just in case). So far, I've only had to tell him that he isn't allowed to take it off at school. I explained that people who suddenly feel the need to protect their belongings (jewelry, cell phones, purses, keys, whatever) end up losing them while in the process of protecting them. If they had simply kept the item in its location, no harm would have come to it. This is easily seen when someone drops their ring down the sink - they take it off to keep it safe. Or when someone decides to move their cell phone from their pocket to a shelf and drop the phone in the toilet. Dumb moves which result in the very consequences they were originally trying to avoid. So, with his new ring, I said that if he doesn't feel he can keep it on his finger (and wants to put it on a different finger or in his pocket), it shouldn't go with him in the first place. I'd hate for him to be on the bus, take his ring off, and have it roll away.

Sorry about all the rambling. I'll have to get some pictures of my new gifts to post. Maybe in the next post. Happy New Year!

We Have a Loft and a Decent Basement!

Well, I should rephrase that. We've had a loft and basement ever since we moved into our house over two years ago, but we were lazy and put a bunch of junk in the loft, like boxes that we didn't feel like unpacking. The basement had our exercise bike, punching bag, and my dad's desk that he gave us. Neither room was being used at all by any of us and I was beginning to feel claustrophobic. This past weekend, we gritted our teeth and got both rooms fixed up.

For the loft, we had to unpack or move all the boxes, take the wonderful gold chairs to the basement (they are from Jeff's parents when we moved in), move the desk upstairs (disassembling it in the basement and reassembling it upstairs), move the boxing equipment to the garage for later installation there, and finally take our old TV and stand from the garage to the basement.

The boxes were simple enough to go through - we unpacked most of them and moved a few of them into the office for later unpacking. Jeff took the chairs to the living room and he and Jordan then went down to the basement and took apart the desk while I vacuumed the now-empty loft. I then went down and helped them bring up the desk in pieces. Back in the loft, we reassembled the desk and it looks fantastic. I moved all our office supplies into it.

In the basement, Jeff and Jordan took apart the boxing equipment (punching bag and speed bag, all on a stand), and we took that out to the garage.

Then came the really hard part. We had to move the TV into the house from the garage, down the stairs, and into the basement. Our TV is an old 36-inch Sony Trinitron and weighs more than any TV I've ever encountered. It took Jeff and I quite a while to get it off the stand and onto the padded dolly. We then had to wheel it up three steps from the garage to the house, which took probably 15 minutes. The stairs to the basement took another 30-40 minutes, then we had to do it again with the stand (which doesn't weigh nearly as much, but it's still a ton). I think it took a total of about 2 hours to move both the TV and the stand and get them set up in the basement. But the results are fantastic. We got the PS2 and the Xbox set up. Both devices can play DVDs, so movies are now an option for down there.

Since completing the work over the weekend, Jordan has spent every evening (after his homework is done) in the basement playing games. Why he would never play them when they were upstairs, I do not know. He seems to like his solitude down there. He has also taken to practicing his trumpet down there. I don't mind hearing him practice, but he seems more at peace when he knows he isn't bothering others and that we're not eavesdropping. Whenever I am in the kitchen while he's practicing, I can barely make out the songs he is working on.

Having two more rooms in use for us is proving to be quite wonderful. While we still have some unpacking to do, the entire house is becoming more open and less crowded. It even seems much bigger now.

Here are some pictures of the loft. As you can see, there isn't a box or pile of junk to be seen now. Plus, the view from the living room no longer looks like it's all walled off up there. I'm so happy. I haven't taken any of the basement yet, but will do so sometime soon.

Loft as seen from the office

Loft as seen from Jordan's doorway

Loft as seen from the living room (kind of blurry, as I took this with my cell phone and apparently can't stand still...lol)

Halloween

We barely managed to snag Halloween this year as it raced by. We've been busy working and attending school, we were sick for a while, and household projects have taken plenty of our time.

Jordan has never been a big fan of any holiday, including Halloween. He isn't a big candy-eater, as evidenced by my finding last year's candy still stashed in his closet last week. While he enjoys watching others go door-to-door in their costumes, he can't stand dressing up. Perhaps the traditional freezing weather has something to do with his aversion. This was the first year that he decided not to do anything specifically for Halloween. On the night before Halloween, he went to a couple haunted houses with some friends and loved those. But he opted not to dress up and go trick-or-treating. Too bad he didn't want to go this year, since it was almost 70 degrees outside during the evening hours. It was the warmest Halloween on record in Denver since the 1950s. We have yet to receive our first snow of the season.

Normally for Halloween we completely decorate the inside and outside of the house with scary things, turn on strobe lights, black lights, scary music, eat a scary dinner (usually alien-green chicken & rice), hand out candy, and go trick-or-treating with Jordan. Because we were busy or simply unaware of the approaching holiday, all we did this year was hand out candy. Since Jordan chose not to go out, we gave him the glorious task of handing out candy to kids who came a-knocking. He didn't like this job any more than we do, so maybe next year he'll be more eager to do something (either go out or have some friends over).

During the week leading up to Halloween, we watched most of the scary or Halloween-like movies we have: The Addams Family, Addams Family Values, Hocus Pocus, and finally, Wait Until Dark. I've seen the first three many times over the years and didn't get much more out of them than usual. However, I haven't seen Wait Until Dark since I was a teenager and it was so much more enthralling than I remembered it to be. Jordan was mostly bored throughout it, but stayed on anyway, although he couldn't quite say why he kept watching. The DVD version of the movie has subtitles and I was amazed to hear (read) much more of the dialogue than I had known existed before. While the movie wasn't as edge-of-your-seat captivating as my memory led me to believe, the intricacies involved in the plot are so wonderful that I enjoyed the movie more than I expected to. Jeff and I were both thrilled with the story and how well it was told. Plus, it was one of Audrey Hepburn's first acting roles where she wasn't meant to simply be eye candy and she did a marvelous job convincing the audience that she was blind and terrified. It was a most memorable movie this time around, although I was appalled at how many people smoked in it, as though the idea that breathing stinky, sticky smoke into your lungs could ever not be bad for you apparently never occurred to anyone back in the 1960s.

Since we had no major happenings aside from a movie on Halloween and therefore didn't have anything important to take pictures of, I will reminisce about the holiday in past years through some pictures. I couldn't find any pictures past age 7. They are either located somewhere else on my storage drive or maybe in actual printed pictures. Either way, I can't find them at this time. Let's see - in 2005 he was a skeleton, in 2006 he was a pirate, and in 2007 he was a death eater from Harry Potter.

Halloween 2001 (Age 4)

He wanted to be a ghost for his first time trick-or-treating in the neighborhood and to wear at his preschool Halloween party. I searched all over for a ghost costume but resorted to making this one by hand. We tried it in a simpler form, but it kept slipping off his head, so it got more and more extravagant. The final result has elastic sewn into the head section so it would stay on Jordan's head.

Stirring the ingredients for pumpkin pies.
Filling the individual pie crusts with the pumpkin pie mixture.

Halloween 2002 (Age 5)

I don't recall if he wanted to go as a dinosaur or if we just gave him a costume to wear that year so he could dress up for school.

From the side

Halloween 2003 (Age 6)

He didn't like the movie much, but wanted to go as Superman anyway.

Two of the pumpkins we carved while visiting Jeff's parents.

Halloween 2004 (Age 7)

Totally enthralled with astronomy, he decided to be an astronaut. Here he is without his helmet on.

And with his helmet on.
Jeff's parents came to visit and carve pumpkins
We made tombstones out of styrofoam and engraved them with fun epitaphs.
Jeff's tombstone reads: Here lies Jeff. There's no place like 127.0.0.1. R.H.I.P.
Jordan's tombstone reads: Here lies Jordan. He ran out of numbers. R. I. P.
Tara's tombstone reads: Here lies Tara. I put my wife beneath this stone for her repose and for my own.
Our cat, Smoky's tombstone reads: Here lies Smoky. She had 9 lives but now they're gone. She wished she had another one!
Our late hamster, Mario's tombstone reads: Here lies Mario. His wheel came off.
Robert & Linda's tombstone reads: Here lie Robert & Linda. In perfect health, died in a sudden and unexpected manner while reading tombstones.

The three of us holding our tombstones (Jeff's in the Terminator mask and Jordan's in the other freaky mask).